The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Even when he worked for Republicans, Ailes did not kowtow to the party’s handpicked candidates. His only statewide campaign work in 1972 that Turnley remembered was for Jim Holshouser, a thirty-seven-year-old moderate state representative in North Carolina, who owned a motel in his hometown of Boone. While he was considering whether to challenge James Gardner, the front-runner, in the Republican primary for governor, Holshouser flew to New York to consult with Ailes. At their first meeting, Turnley recalled, “Roger sat him down and said in no uncertain terms, ‘You’re gonna have to spend millions of dollars. I believe I can get you elected. But the downside is: you don’t have the party’s backing, you have to find your own funding, you’re the underdog, and your name recognition is very poor. So we have a real uphill battle. Your opponent is going to find everything that you possibly ever did your entire life and drag it through the press. You have to realize all these things.’ ” Ailes’s speech roused the young Republican. Right there in Ailes’s office, Holshouser picked up the phone and instructed his real estate broker to sell the property to raise cash. After developing a set of devastatingly effective attack ads, Ailes propelled Holshouser into office, making him the first Republican governor elected in the state since 1901.

  Despite the success, the political work seemed to be little more than a side project. “I don’t think Roger had settled on a particular future at that juncture,” Turnley recalled.

  As he had done at earlier turning points in his career—at the college radio station, on the Douglas set, and during the Nixon campaign—Ailes reached out to more senior hands for help. On February 12, 1971, he wrote to Jack Rourke for help landing a new gig for Kelly Garrett. “Enclosed is a picture and biography of a gal that my company now manages. She is west coast based and a very talented gal,” Ailes wrote. “I thought you might like to use her in one of your telethons.” Ailes also asked Rourke to help book Garrett at the Hilton with the big band leader Horace Heidt Jr. In the black and white photograph, Garrett posed amid a stand of palm trees. Her wide movie star smile, plunging neckline, and long raven hair that spilled gently over her bare shoulders were striking.

  Kelly Garrett, born Ellen Boulton, was four years younger than Ailes. One of ten children, she grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a house without a television. She started singing around town in small venues. At age twenty-two, she married an actor after running off with him to chase her show business dreams in California. As Garrett’s cabaret career took off, her marriage foundered. She got a divorce in October 1970.

  Rourke responded, offering to do whatever he could to help Garrett. “I’ll put you in touch with Horace Heidt, Jr.,” he wrote. But something more promising than a gig with Heidt was beckoning Kelly: Broadway. In 1972, Ailes raised money to mount his first theatrical production. Tapping into the 1960s cultural outwash, Ailes chose Mother Earth, a trippy, environmental-themed rock musical revue created by a group of social workers, academics, and antiwar protesters who founded the South Coast Repertory company in Costa Mesa, California. They were liberal outcasts in the heart of Richard Nixon country.

  Costa Mesa, located about forty miles south of Los Angeles in the center of Orange County, was not exactly friendly territory for a progressive theater to open its doors in the summer of 1964. But the conservative spirit of the region did not deter the South Coast Repertory Company from attempting their experiment in an out-of-business marine supply store a few miles from John Wayne’s home. Over several months in 1969, members of the company developed a rock revue about pollution and overpopulation. Toni Tennille, an aspiring Alabama-born pop singer, wrote the music, and Ron Thronson, a social worker with a master’s degree in theater, wrote the script and the lyrics. Thronson also served as director. The musical, he wrote in the preface of the script, “has an element of mysticism.” Many songs were written “to put humans into proper perspective with our universe.”

  The show opened the night of January 8, 1971, in front of a 150-person crowd. On a sparsely decorated stage, the cast performed their numbers in front of a projection of 35-millimeter slides showcasing photos taken by the theater’s photographer, Ken Shearer. “I am one with the soil of my birth,” they sang. What followed were dystopian scenes of overpopulated hellscapes ruined by pollution. One sketch, set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, advocated unfettered access to birth control, abortion, and assisted suicides. Near the beginning of the first act, a woman, described by the stage directions as “the embodiment of all that is mediocre, middle-class, and narrow,” tries to sow doubt. “Hello America! Who says pollution is bad for you? Who says it kills? Have YOU seen it kill?” But by the end of the play, she returns onstage having undergone a kind of spiritual transformation. “Brothers and sisters,” she says, “these poisons in our environment are the omens of an angry God. Get down on your knees and beg forgiveness, that these things might be borne away on the wings of penance.”

  At curtain call, the actors knew the show was going to be a hit. “After we ended, it was dead silent. We were just standing there, and then all of a sudden, the audience erupted,” South Coast cofounder and cast member Jim dePriest recalled. “They ran onto the stage, and everyone was hugging each other. They were just raving about the show.” By the time Mother Earth closed five weeks later, bigger venues clamored to book the show. After successful runs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, veteran lyricist Ray Golden, a writer for the Marx Brothers whose credits included the Broadway revues Catch a Star! and Alive and Kicking, made a hard sell to Tennille and Thronson to sell him the rights to bring Mother Earth to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre, a one-thousand-seat playhouse on West 44th Street.

  Ailes was in on the deal. He knew Golden through the Mike Douglas world, and saw Mother Earth, at his urging, during its West Coast run. “Roger came back and said, we oughta do it on Broadway,” Paul Turnley remembered. “I think he liked that it had that Hair quality.” Over lunch at Musso & Frank, the iconic Hollywood restaurant, Ailes and Golden worked the young songwriters. They assured Thronson and Tennille they would not meddle in the musical when they brought it—and the show’s cast—to Broadway. Thronson and Tennille agreed to sell the rights, but it soon became evident that Golden, who took over as director, in addition to being producer, had his own plans to modify the show for a mainstream audience.

  A couple of months before the show was scheduled to open on October 19, 1972, Tennille refused to perform Golden’s version. “It turned into a borscht belt musical,” South Coast cofounder Martin Benson said. “We got bamboozled,” Tennille later told the press. With Tennille out, Golden needed a new female lead and a serious cash infusion. Ailes, with connections to wealthy investors and a client looking for her Broadway star turn, could provide both.

  As the Broadway debut of Mother Earth approached, Ailes recognized his need for an experienced guide to steer him through the unique folkways of the New York theater world. A year earlier, at Golden’s suggestion, he met the Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden at a party in Bloomgarden’s apartment on Central Park West. A decade had passed since the faded power broker’s last hit, but Bloomgarden’s career had taken him to the pinnacle of American theater. In the 1940s and 1950s, he collaborated closely with friends Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman. His string of critical and commercial successes, in addition to Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Hellman’s The Little Foxes, included Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, and Stephen Sondheim’s musical Anyone Can Whistle. By the early 1970s, however, Bloomgarden had fallen on hard times. His right leg had been amputated, a consequence of arteriosclerosis, and his bills were piling up. When Ailes and Ray Golden went to him for advice on Mother Earth, Bloomgarden agreed to sign on as a consulting producer. “Given the circumstance he was in, the opportunity to create some income advising someone on a show was appealing,” his son John Bloomgarden recalled.

  Bloomgarden ushered Ailes into an entirely new artis
tic milieu. A first-generation Russian Jew, Bloomgarden produced plays in part as expressions of his deep belief in social justice. During the height of McCarthyism, Bloomgarden attended a meeting of the Freedom from Fear Committee to mobilize support for the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.” Though Bloomgarden was never called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his friends were. The experience left him with a conspiratorial view of politics and an acute suspicion of the American right.

  “What the hell are you doing with people from Nixon?” Robert Cohen, Bloomgarden’s assistant, asked after learning of his association with Ailes.

  “Forget about that. Look, I got a script,” Bloomgarden said.

  Bloomgarden earned Ailes’s admiration from his very first suggestion. Dump Ray Golden, Bloomgarden said. “Roger knew he had found a soul mate when Kermit told him that,” Stephen Rosenfield, who worked for Ailes after Turnley, said. “His first suggestion is to fire the man who brought him in? That guy is only interested in success.”

  But Ailes couldn’t dump Golden. He held the rights. What Ailes could contribute was money. To finance Mother Earth, Ailes reached out to Howard Butcher, the Philadelphia investment banker who had helped him launch REA Productions after the 1968 campaign. “The next thing I know, he calls me up and says, ‘I wanna do this show. It’s an ecology based show—a series of vignettes, put together by Kermit Bloomgarden,’ ” Butcher recalled. “I raised most of the money for the show. I should have known right there it wasn’t a Broadway show.”

  Cast members struggled to muster enthusiasm for the production. The more Golden meddled, the worse the production became. Frank Coombs, a dancer who performed in the show, described Golden as an “old, bald and sporadic” director, who turned Mother Earth into something “pretty wretched.” Cast member John Bennett Perry, the TV actor and father of Friends star Matthew Perry, said, “It needed a different staging. Ray was out of his element.” The actors took their cues from Bloomgarden, who hobbled daily into the Belasco to observe the rehearsals. “He’d sit in the back room and look like he was looking at a big bottle of vinegar,” the actor Rick Podell said. Ailes was less visible. “I think he was pushed around a bit by Ray,” Podell said. “He didn’t know how to bully his way in. Roger wasn’t versed in how to do it. Kermit was, but, by that time, he was so fucking old, he’d just sit in the back and scowl at us.”

  By this point, Kelly Garrett was in rehearsals, having assumed Toni Tennille’s starring role. “She was striking looking and a hell of a singer, but she had no Broadway experience that I knew of,” Perry recalled. The actors started to wonder. “Roger made sure she had some solos,” Podell said. “People go, ‘Wait a minute. Is the producer fucking the leading lady?’ ” Frank Coombs, who was asked to help Garrett learn the choreography, saw the show as a springboard for her ambitions: “It was horrifying to have to teach Kelly how to dance. I wasn’t allowed to touch her. The only reason the show existed was Roger was dating Kelly Garrett, and Kelly needed Broadway work.”

  Ailes appeared to bask in playing the part of a big-shot producer. Inviting John Bennett Perry to his office one day, Ailes sat behind his expansive desk and doled out career advice. “What do you envision for yourself? If you get there, will you be happy?” Ailes asked him straight off. Looking back, Podell recognized “a lot of latent Donald Trump in Roger.” Robert Cohen thought Ailes could pass for a Mississippi river-boat gambler. He talked a mile a minute. “I’m Roger Ailes, how do you do?” he said in their first encounter at the Belasco. “You were in the Joe McGinniss book, I read about you,” Cohen replied. “Yeah, I sold The Trick to the American people,” Ailes said, referring to Nixon, “now I’m going to sell this, and it’s going to be great.”

  Ailes worked his political and media connections to promote the show. By staging a photo shoot of cast members riding bicycles around Manhattan wearing gas masks instead of helmets, Ailes got their picture in the newspaper. Ailes made another plug to Joe McGinniss, when he called up from the ’72 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. On assignment for The New York Times Magazine, McGinniss was hoping for a pithy quote from Ailes about Nixon, but instead got a mouthful about Mother Earth. “It’s a great show. There’s at least three songs in it that will become classics,” Ailes boasted. “I don’t know anything about Broadway, but I’m learning. It’s much more exciting than politics. Nixon was O.K.—but all those state campaigns—wow! I mean, I finally got bored with South Dakota.” Ailes also reached out to his White House contacts, having Len Garment spread word around the West Wing.

  After the curtain came down on opening night, Ailes ran up to Cohen, gushing about the performance.

  “What do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “Do you think we got a hit? I think we got a hit.”

  Cohen was incredulous. Based on disappointing advance ticket sales, he had already announced to the cast that the show might close.

  “Forget it, Roger. You’re opening with a closing notice up.”

  The next morning, The New York Times delivered its verdict. John Bennett Perry got a call from Ailes’s office. “Don’t read the paper,” he was told. In a savage review, Clive Barnes called the music “at its worst characterless, and at its best—to use that chilling measure of air quality—acceptable.”

  The cast did not dispute Barnes’s assessment. “The second night of the show, there were eight sailors and a doughnut,” Podell recalled.

  Ailes initially hoped that word-of-mouth marketing could overcome the harsh reviews. But Ailes soon confronted the embarrassing failure of the show, something the cast respected. Within a week, Ailes was in Perry’s dressing room talking about the show’s future. “The question was to close it or not. I told him, ‘You might as well,’ ” Perry recalled. “He was resolved to do a good job even as it didn’t work.” After just a dozen performances, Mother Earth closed.

  Ailes recognized he had overreached. “My eyes were too big for my stomach,” he remarked years later. Before bringing the show to New York, Ailes considered a smaller venue. “The main discussion was whether we do it Off-Off Broadway or Broadway, but Roger never does things in halves,” his assistant Paul Turnley recalled. Butcher’s investors lost everything and Ailes’s business suffered. “He had put a lot of his own money in,” Turnley said. “When Mother Earth closed, he called me in and said, ‘I’m sorry I have to let you go. I’ll keep you on until you find a job. I’ll write you a glowing reference, so don’t worry about that.’ ”

  Failure taught Ailes valuable lessons. He had agreed with Bloomgarden’s directive at the outset to fire Golden, but was powerless to do so because Golden held the rights. It was confirmation that control was a precondition for success. Failure also taught Ailes not to listen to doubters. “Don’t ever chase critics, and don’t ever try to produce anything the critics are going to love,” Ailes recalled Bloomgarden telling him.

  The box office disappointment of Mother Earth did not diminish Ailes’s appetite for the theater. In fact, in the months after Mother Earth closed, he pushed beyond the schmaltzy appeal of Broadway into the artistic swirl of New York’s vibrant Off-Off-Broadway scene. As he would later tell it, Ailes often ventured, sometimes alone, into small playhouses at night to scout new productions—though the truth was less romantic. He hired Robert Cohen on a freelance basis to read scripts and attend openings.

  One day in February 1973, Cohen received a phone call from Bloomgarden, who excitedly told him about a new play he had just seen at the Circle Repertory Company in its early home on the Upper West Side. The play had been written by Lanford Wilson, a cofounder of the company, and depicted a group of drifters who make their home near the Baltimore railway station in a crumbling nineteenth-century hotel slated for demolition. It’s Memorial Day, but the characters are too far gone or strung-out to notice. The marquee identifies the hotel as Hot l Baltimore, the title of Wilson’s play, as no one had bothered to replace the missing letter.
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br />   In the sinking fortunes of the hotel and its sad inhabitants, Wilson presented a wry meditation on American decline. Cohen, who attended the production the night Bloomgarden called, was impressed. “I thought, My God, it’s like The Iceman Cometh. These are people on the margins of society. People you don’t want to look at. But they’re making you look at them. They’re making you see them. And they’re telling you truths about yourself and life and the society we live in.”

  After the show, Cohen hustled out to a pay phone on Broadway and called Bloomgarden.

  “Do you really like it?” Bloomgarden asked.

  “Not only do I really like it, more important, I understand why you like it. Kermit, this is the kind of show you would have put on twenty years ago.”

  “How much do you think it would cost to move the show to Broadway?”

  “Don’t do it on Broadway,” Cohen said. “You’re not exactly going to sell theater tickets to the Hadassah of Great Neck.”

  “Well, that’s true.”

  “Do it big-time Off-Broadway.”

  “Do you think we could get the money from Roger?”

  “You just might.”

  The next day at the office, Ailes reacted coolly to Cohen’s idea like the dozen other shows he had brought to him. “Roger, take my word for it,” Cohen said. “Kermit wants to do the play. He doesn’t have any money, but he knows what’s good. You want to do a play, you still want to juggle your other stuff, but you have the money. This is a marriage made in heaven, Roger. Take my word for it. If you don’t like this deal, I will quit right now and you’ll never see me again, I promise you.”

  Ailes reluctantly agreed and Cohen got him a ticket for that night. During the show, Cohen waited for Ailes on the sidewalk.